[rrayner]

In early February of 2009, my wife Cynthia and I were enjoying a fire in the fireplace and I got out my old Song Flute. This was my first instrument -- a straight, black ebonite flute with a range of an octave and a step and a fingering system very similar to that of a saxophone. Cynthia, who had no musical training at all, asked to try it. She did, and was able to play a C Major scale and worked her way through the first part of Do-Re-Mi and a couple of other basic tunes. She loved it and told me if I were willing to teach her, she would try to learn to read music. We started. About 5 weeks later, she started transitioning to a soprano recorder. Cynthia is an ardent student -- she has not missed a day of practice in all this time.

Cynthia has become quite accomplished over this time and has almost 150 songs in her repertoire. I have used Notation Composer to provide her with printed music and exercises for her book. Also, she has been given several music books and plays a number of songs from them. Some that she wants to play, are not in a good range for her recorder, so I suggested she learn the rudiments of Notation Composer to enter and transpose these songs. Last night was her first introduction to Notation Composer. She entered Unchained Melody, transposed and printed it with very little difficulty. It was a very short learning experience for her, as she found the data entry to be quite intuitive and straight-forward. Score one for Notation Composer and its "ease of use."

Ralph Rayner